Georgia: Meet The Teens Trying To Flip 60K Students Planning To Vote For Perdue (R-GA)

[appalachiablue]

- GA students est. 'Students for 2020' to mobilize young voters & aim to register 40,000 new voters for the state runoff.

Daily Kos, Nov. 25, 2020. When 17-year-old Georgia students Edward Aguilar, Jordan Umusu, Sahan Reddy, and Michael Giusto founded the website Students For 2020, they wanted to provide a place that would not only help college students register to vote but also help them determine which state their vote would matter most in. With many students having dual residency, the choice is often theirs to vote at home or in their college towns. “We kind of like to think of it as reverse gerrymandering,” Aguilar said in a recent interview with Daily Kos.

It worked. They ended up registering more than 65,000 students nationally for the 2020 presidential election and 17,000 students in Georgia alone by sharing their website in college email threads and group chats. It was the kind of showing of force with young people that grassroots efforts throughout the state have embraced. Now, Aguilar, Umusu, Reddy, and Giusto have their eyes on getting 40,000 new student voters registered and flipping 60,000 students planning to vote for Republican Sen. David Perdue in Georgia’s upcoming runoff.

The runoff is Jan. 5. Click here to request an absentee ballot. Early in-person voting starts Dec. 14. And REGISTER TO VOTE here by Dec. 7.

“Our goal is to flip these elections entirely through the student voting bloc [given that the mass majority of the incoming waves of political funding will be targeted to the older demographics,]” Giusto said in an email to Daily Kos. His organization, which recently launched a new website with the goal of attracting more young people to government service overall, is focusing in part on more than 23,000 17-year-olds in Georgia. They’ll be turning 18 between November 3 and January 5 and eligible to vote for the first time in the Senate runoff. It’s a demographic that youth-focused organizations throughout the state are focusing on from Campus Vote Project efforts at Historically Black Colleges and Universities to the youth empowerment movement Opportunity Youth United.

The ladder has registered 85 people in the last year and held more than 50 events this year alone both virtually and in person, including a voter registration day held in the underserved and overlooked southwest Atlanta community of Pittsburgh, youth advocate Shanice Turner said in an email to Daily Kos. Her focus has been on voter mobilization, education, registration, and voting suppression release. “Sadly, voter suppression in Georgia is real,” Turner said in an email to Daily Kos repeating the words of ACLU of Georgia Executive Director Andrea Young. The nonprofit filed a lawsuit naming then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp for “wrongly purging 160,000 registered voters from the active voter rolls” in 2017 and trying to close polling locations in predominantly Black communities in Atlanta. Turner highlighted southwest Atlanta and south DeKalb County.

“Voting is not seen as a solution or as a resolution to many of the issues that we have in our communities,” Turner said. But it is, she added...

More,

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/11/25/1997996/-Meet-the-Georgia-teens-trying-to-flip-60-000-students-planning-to-vote-for-Perdue?pm_source=story_sidebar



- Kimberly Pham, Shanice Turner, & Shaquana Boykin (left to right) at an Opportunity Youth United voter registration, Sept. 22, Atlanta.

[brer cat]

1. They are learning how to win!

I applaud their efforts.

[Wednesdays]

2. K&R. nt

[Blue Owl]

3. Good on 'em and wishing for success!